Trieste and the City of the Future

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1:33To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And I've just told John, by the way, I am in Trieste in Italy. I'm going to tell you all about that in a second. The tour continues. The tour continues. I'm actually here, John, at, you will love this, you will absolutely love this, at the Trieste Joyce Summer School, where I am discussing James Joyce with, I can tell you, right, Joyceans. Joyceans are like a cult, okay? Yes, okay. And it's really funny when you're amongst them. You're deep in that cult, though, Mac.

2:20Yeah, no, no, I'm only semi-detached, right? I'm only semi-detached. I mean, they're really lovely people. But, I mean, the one upmanship about Joyce is hilarious. Oh, really? They remind me of biblical scholars, right? You know, a biblical scholar would say, well, in fact, you know, in Ezekiel chapter 1, verse 9, the Lord said X, not Y. Or in Deuteronomy, or in Genesis.

2:46David McWilliams: So they're like sort of Old Testament Presbyterian scholars. Actually, they're like those Jews who study the Torah, you know, the yeshiva students, the ringlets, right? Like the one with the ringlets who spend all their time. So you're kind of going in and saying, well, you know, I think this, well, I'll tell you, you might think this, but I know. So there's all that carry on going on. What is it like Molly Bloom used her right hand instead of her left hand? Oh, John, that is, that is, no, no, no, no, no. That's a generalist mistake. We're talking specific mistakes. They're really lovely people, but you are, it is like observing sort of creatures in the wild, really.

3:21You know, when you're, when you're because of it. Are they all dickied up with their hats and their dickie bows and all that kind of stuff? No, no, no. They should be because it's roasting here. But no, they're not. They're not. That's more the Bloomsday stuff. But I'm here to talk about Joyce in Trieste, the city of Trieste. But I was just thinking, Trieste is up the road from Venice. Yeah. And this is the place that Jeff Bezos should have had his wedding. Okay. And I decided in a future life, John, I want to come back as Jeff Bezos's wedding planner. if there is reincarnation Frank okay I'm going to change sexual affiliation become a wedding planner and work on commission I would love to have worked on commission at Jeff Bezos' wedding but it cost

4:05David McWilliams: what was it I heard a figure of 48 million hundreds of millions or it could be more yeah and that's just down the road here in Venice Trieste was spared Venice's fate of having to host now that is a savannah of wildlife the Jeff Bezos wedding and the creatures and the creators. But you kind of wonder, what was the crack like? Because they were so obsessed with, yeah, no crack at all. They were so obsessed with, you know, getting the right picture, the right angle, the right, you know, facial pose, everything. But where's the crack? Forget the right facial pose, John, the right face. Well, that's true.

4:43The right filler in the lips and stuff. I know, I know. So listen, I'm up the road, but just mark my words, right? I am going to turn into a flamboyant, very gay wedding planner. You're not far off of it, Mac. Anyway, we will talk about Trieste. I will talk about why Joyce was here. I want to talk about what happens when cities transform themselves and the economic history of this city and why it went from being a backwater to being the center of European commerce and art and philosophy and intrigue, and then why it all collapsed. And why now, like a lot of great European cities, it is a tourist destination in the main rather than a manufacturing hub.

5:30And then we're going to ask the question later on, where is the Trieste of now? Like if I make the claim that this was the city of the late 19th century, early 20th century, the question is, where is the new Trieste, right? Is it in Europe? Is it in America? Or is it much more likely, John, to be in Asia? And because, of course, what you need for great cities is you need great production of something. And the Asians are producing everything. Yeah, so what does a great city do for the economy of the country, but also of the region? Of the region and also why individuals, key individuals, craft and create the future and the present of great cities.

6:20By the way, if you're into all this sort of stuff, there's a great little book by Jane Jacobs called The Economies of Cities in 19...

6:28David McWilliams: I think late 60s, she might have published it. I'm not so sure. Well worth a look. Anyway, so we're going to start, John, with a statue I walked by last night. And it's a statue of the amazing... Bezos, was it? It wasn't Bezos. It was somebody who added a little bit more to global culture. Giuseppe Verdi. Giuseppe Verdi, the Italian composer, writer, opera extraordinaire. You know how Giuseppe Verdi sounds really, really interesting? Do you know what his name would be in English? Gerry Green. Joe Green, exactly. He sounds much less exotic than Giuseppe Verdi. But I'm looking at Giuseppe Verdi and I'm thinking about why there is a statue of Verdi here in Trieste.

7:15Because he's not from here. He's from Padova down the road. Yeah. And the reason is the following, John. The Suez Canal is opened in 1871. And Verdi was commissioned to write the opera Aida. Ah, yes. For the opening of the Suez Canal. And the backstory of Aida, John, is a glorification of pharaohic culture, of the pharaoh, of the sphinx, of the pyramids. Now, why did Giuseppe Verdi, A, write Aida, and B, why is there a statue in Trieste? This is the beginning of our story. By the way, I think the debut performance of that was done around the pyramids itself. Exactly, John. Yeah. Exactly.

8:02David McWilliams: Right. I'm not a huge opera fan, but Aida has some banging tunes, in fairness. It has some banging tunes. In fact, we might even play a little bit of Aida in the back to kind of get the listener into a sort of operatic mood, okay? Into an operatic mood, okay? So we're trying to draw together a story. So why is he in Trieste? Why was Aida set against the backdrop of the pharaohs? And why was the first performance of Aida in 1871 such a magnificent sort of over-the-top camp? It was the Jeff Bezos' wedding of the opera world, okay, at the time. And as you said, it took place in Egypt. And then what has this got to do with James Joyce?

8:41David McWilliams: And what has it got to do with Trieste? Okay. Yes, yeah, yeah. String it together for us. So the Suez Canal is the key engineering moment of this story. The Suez Canal is commissioned by a guy called Ishmael Pasha. Ismail Pasha sounds very, very Arabic, doesn't he? He was actually an Albanian or possibly a Montenegro. Oh. He became the Tlidiv, which was the Ottoman word for the governor of Egypt. Egypt was run by the Ottoman Empire. And Egypt, after the invasion of Napoleon, where we heard about Christopher de Bleng a couple of weeks ago, the Egyptians after the Napoleonic invasion in 1798, the Egyptians realized they were miles behind the Europeans.

9:32The Europeans destroyed them on the battlefield, destroyed them in science. Europeans were introducing all sorts of radical ideas. And the Egyptians, having been dictated by the Quran and been unbelievably traditional,

9:48David McWilliams: didn't realize how far behind they were. Now, Egypt wasn't Egypt. It was a province of the Ottoman Empire. And this, of course, was following the golden age of Islam that happened years beforehand. But they were the pinnacle of the world and civilization and thought and ideas and all that kind of stuff. But then they were passed out. Then they were passed out. Why? Because they went back to the good book. They went back to the Koran and they became traditionalists, right? So lots of stuff going on at the time. okay, Ismail Pasha arrives as the governor of Egypt under the instructions of the Ottoman Empire.

10:27And Ismail Pasha was also a possibly multinegrin, possibly Albanian, but definitely somebody from the Balkans. Now, people might be listening and say, well, how come somebody from the Balkans

10:39David McWilliams: ends up the governor of Egypt on behalf of the Ottomans? Because we forget that the Western Ottoman Empire extended all the way up to Sarajevo. So what we know is Greece, bits of Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, and of course Bosnia. These were all provinces of the Ottoman Empire. So even the great Ataturk John wasn't born in Turkey. He was born in Greece. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Ishmael Pasha is the Balkan administrator of Egypt on behalf of the Ottomans. He realizes or thinks if Egypt is to develop, it has to join the global economy. The same way as we figured out in Ireland, if we have to develop, we have to join the American economy.

11:33It's the same idea, right? We have to think of some trick that we can actually propel us into the modern world. So the trick that Ishmael Pasha understood was if they can do something that the Romans were trying to do, which was build the Suez Canal.

11:50David McWilliams: Believe it or not, the first effort to build it was the Romans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Because the Romans realized that the passage to India could be made much shorter if they didn't have to take all their camels off at what was Alexandria and go across the desert and then go back into the Red Sea. If they could actually cut and cleave a quarry through the rock, they could actually shorten the journey. But they didn't have the industrial and mechanical capacity. And hence, they never made it to India. They never made it to India, but they traded with the Indians a lot. A hell of a lot. They traded with them.

12:27David McWilliams: Mubarak told you that Pliny the Elder was pissed off about all the gold going to India. Oh, that's right, yes. The Indians looked at the Romans and said, your produce is so shite, we don't want anything. We will trade with you, but only in return for gold because you're so backward. The Indians were miles ahead of anyone else. So we're back in the 19th century. So Ishmael Pasha says, okay, we're going to build the Suez Canal. But of course, they couldn't build the Suez Canal because they didn't have the finance. And this story is the story of how finance changed the world. Because the Suez Canal is as much a story of financial engineering as it is a story of mechanical engineering.

13:11So Verdi, his statue is a stone's throw away from the stock exchange here in Trieste. So the reason Verdi has a statue in Trieste is Verdi wrote Aida. Aida was the opera that opened the Suez Canal, which is why, as you said, all the Pyrenons were in the background. But why, hang on a second, but why Trieste and not any of the other big cities around at the time?

13:38David McWilliams: That is a crucial part of the story. The reason is twofold. The Suez Canal completely transformed Trieste, number one, from a backwater to Europe's preeminent city. And number two, financiers from Trieste stumped up a significant amount of the risk capital for the Suez Canal. So you have two things going on. That's why the stock exchange is important, right? Yeah. Didn't know there was a stock exchange in Trieste. Massive one. Massive one. That's bizarre in itself. It is bizarre until you delve deep into the history. So mid-19th century, there is the emergence of what you would describe as a mercantile middle class in Europe.

14:27These are the people who owned the factories of the Industrial Revolution in the main. These are the people who owned the trade routes. These are the people who had the access to the special licenses to import this, that, and the other. Now, when you get a middle class and you get their clerical class coming underneath, like officers, clerical officers, bankers, lawyers, accountants, all these attendant professionals of the commercial class, they do something very new in the 19th century.

14:56David McWilliams: They begin to save. And the thing about savings is savings have to be recycled. And that's why the stock market comes in. So the stock market is a completely novel idea for most cities. And the reason the stock market is novel is that prior to having savings, you had no need for stocks because people had no money. It was just the king had money and a couple of the big bonds, right? So was the stock exchange in Trieste one of the first stock exchanges? You have an explosion. 90 % of stock exchanges in the world emerged between 1860 and 1890. Right. 90 % of all of them, right? So the Triestean one is unbelievably important in the story of the Suez Canal.

15:43Why? Because the Suez Canal was an incredibly risky idea. And no one person or one company would shoulder that risk alone because the cost of failure is phenomenal. But if you could spread the risk over thousands of people, each with a little sliver of an interest in the Suez Canal via a share, what you could do is you could disseminate the risk so that you create a company that laid off its own risk against all its shareholders and generate enough capital to finance this extraordinary engineering feat, which was in effect boring a hole through the continent. which is what they did. Now, amazingly, the Triestian people were the people who got behind a guy called Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was the French engineer who came up with the idea.

16:39And of course, he was French

16:40David McWilliams: because the Napoleonic French were in Egypt. They'd been knocked around by the Brits, but they were still very much part of the background noise. And so then you get to this extraordinary person called Ravoltella. Pasquale di Ravoltella. Right, okay. Pasquale di Ravoltella is the man who made modern Trieste, who started his life, John, as a butcher's son in Venice and ended up a baron of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. So that's an amazing feat of social upward mobility and aspiration. So let's suggest this guy is a fantastically brilliant individual, right? Joyce ends up working in the Ravotella Commercial University, translating as an English teacher.

17:27Okay, so there's a lot of people. Okay. But I want to get you back, right, to the time. So what is going on here that isn't going on in other cities? Yes, and why? So the first thing is the Suez Canal totally and utterly changes the trade routes of the world. Yeah. because it cuts the passage to India by, can you imagine this, 10 days. 5 ,000 miles and 10 days is cut off the passage to India. And of course, what does that mean is that all the trade that was going around the Cape of Good Hope.

18:07David McWilliams: Yes. Remember we were talking about our friends in Franchuk a couple of weeks ago? Yes, yeah, yeah. And they had to get around the Cape of Good Hope, which is a feat in itself, but also past the Skeleton Coast and Namibia and Angola. All that stuff. Yeah. So that was a pain. And that's why, for example, they lost their ships. They had to stop for refueling. They had to stop for all sorts of things, right? Whereas if you board a hole through Africa, the Suez Canal cut the journey by 10 days, 5 ,000 miles, and it was obviously much, much cheaper. So suddenly what you've got is if you look at global economic history, remember we talked about ages ago, when the Americas opened up and when Vasco da Gama went around the Cape of Good Hope, suddenly Italy, that had been the center of the world because it was in the middle of the Mediterranean, became not so much isolated, but ignored.

19:03Yes.

19:04David McWilliams: So Italian cities like Florence and Venice went into decline and Atlantic cities like Amsterdam and London went into the ascendancy. Why? Because all the trade was going through the Atlantic. Lisbon, even in the south of Spain, you have Seville and Cadiz. And then, of course, you had London and Amsterdam. These cities emerged, right? And, of course, what gave them their comparative advantage was the Atlantic. Yeah. That was the only way to Asia. Now, with the creation of the Suez Canal, Now, the city that became the preeminent maritime city was Trieste on the elbow of the Adriatic because the Adriatic went from being a cul-de-sac, which is what it was for centuries, to being a trading route.

19:54And was Trieste one of these trading cities? What do you call them?

19:58David McWilliams: Kind of that Hanseatic sort of type cities, like a mercantile city. No, no, this is the fascinating thing. So Trieste ends up being the only port of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. So the Austrian-Hungarian Empire continues to go south. So we forget the Austrian-Hungarian Empire should have been called the United States of Austria-Hungary. Yeah. Because it involved different languages, different cultures. It went from Ukraine, today's Ukraine, down to Trieste. It went from Bucharest up to Prague. it involved cities of course like budapest like vienna but also it had this extraordinary reach and i happen to think that if i were to come back maybe not as a wedding planner but if i if i was born in a different generation i'd love to be born in the austrian-hungarian empire around 1850 i think it would be an incredibly interesting right yeah yeah yeah okay so So what you have then is cleverly, because the shorthand for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was always backward and it was slow, but not at all.

21:04So the Austrians figured out one thing, which is that nationalism was a serious, serious threat to the empire. So what they did in the late 18th century, which is amazingly farsighted, they introduced a thing called the Edict of Tolerance. and the Edict of Tolerance allowed Orthodox Christians and Jews to trade openly in certain cities. Right, okay. And what this created... Well, that was unusual for that time, was it?

21:35David McWilliams: Completely unusual because basically the Catholic countries never gave licenses to trade to Orthodox Christians or Jews. It was basically our Protestants. Our Protestants, right? Our Protestants, yeah. Well, that's all right. No, no. So the Austrians decided we'll have loads of prods We'll have loads of Jews and we'll have loads of Orthodox Christians in Trieste. So what happened was you get this amazing migration of hustlers, people on the make, people trying to better themselves, come into this city at the start of the 19th century. Halfway through the 19th century, they're all here trading, buying, selling, doing their stuff.

22:14It's an incredibly tolerant city.

22:16David McWilliams: I'll give you some statistics, which is an amazing thing. Okay. So the Suez Canal changes the dynamic. It opens up the city, but there's also this extra ingredient that I always believe is essential for economic development, which is cosmopolitanism. You need a diverse ecosystem of people and cultures and people on the make and hustlers. You need to always rest yourself free of aristocratic and vertical hierarchies and have what I call these horizontal hierarchies, these networks, right? So after the age of tolerance, right, Right. Trieste becomes a melting pot of Italians, Austrians, Slovenes, Czechs, Croats, Poles, Armenians and Serbs.

22:54David McWilliams: Right. By the beginning of the 20th century, I'm reading from a book, which is very good, called Money, A History of... Yeah, right. OK. Shameless plug. No, no, but this is great stuff, John. By the beginning of the 20th century, right, this is the city that Joyce came to. And the reason Joyce came here, because it was the place to go. It was a fantastic, interesting city. So by the beginning of the 20th century, Trieste hosted churches of Lutherans, Methodists, Swiss and Valdezian Protestants, John. I'll tell you about them in a second. Anglicans, Armenians, in addition to a large Catholic, Jewish, Greek and Serbian Orthodox community.

23:30David McWilliams: Now, this is fascinating. The dialect, Triestino, which is the language, the dialect that people speak here. And James Joyce's kids would have actually been grown up speaking this dialect, right? Right. Absorbed bits of, check this out, this shows you how many people lived here. Bits of Armenian, English, Spanish, Sicilian, Turkish, Maltese, German, Hungarian, Croatian, Yiddish, Czech, and Greek. And this is a fascinating thing. Marx, not a great friend of the show, but nonetheless, let's quote him. Yeah. Marx was asked, why is Trieste so successful? and Venice, which was the most successful city in the region, not so successful by the early 21st century.

24:16David McWilliams: And he said something brilliant. He said, how then came it to pass that Trieste and not Venice became the cradle of revived navigation in the Adriatic? And he said, this is a quote, Venice is a town of reminiscences. Trieste shared the privilege of the United States of having no past at all, formed by a motley crew of Italian, German, English, French, Greek, Armenian and Jewish merchants and venturers. It was not fettered by the traditions of the city of the lagoons. And that is a beautiful passage. You don't always get an homage to Marx on this particular economic podcast, but what he understood was you need this spark of novelty and people trying to get on and disparate people, you know, hanging out together, tolerated together.

25:04David McWilliams: There is the dynamo of creativity. Yeah, so what happened to that dialect? It's still spoken. Oh, right. It's still spoken, but it's not as it used to be because it's been really absorbed into Italian. Right, yes, yeah, that's what I would have thought. So when they became really Italian-Italian, lots of those little words kind of started to disappear, and the older folk who speak it probably speak it a bit, but it was this vibrant dialect. But now, it's like what happens in France. Like, all those dialects are being subsumed into proper French. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, that's the nature of language itself.

25:35It's a living language. thing. As we spoke about last week. Indeed. Eclectically. Well, let me ask you then, if, you know, so Trieste was the city of its time. What's the city of its time now, of this time? Excellent question. Well, let's talk about that after the break.

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28:33Mac, we've been talking about Trieste, the end of the 19th century, early 20th century. So that was the place to be at that period. Yes. So where is it now? Where is the place to be? You know, the place of innovation, the place that's the city of the future, as it were. Well, I think what is fascinating, just before we answer that question, it's not just that it was the place to be economically, but it's that economics and other innovations in thinking and human progression always go together. So just imagine we're talking about the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

29:12David McWilliams: We're looking at Vienna as the main city, right? But think what's going on in the world, right? You have Einstein at this stage, early 20th century. is working on the theory of relativity. So you're the beginning of the nuclear age. You have Freud, and Freud, it's basically the modernist age. So Freud is working on psychoanalysis. You've Picasso introducing cubism in art. In Vienna, just think about what's going on in Vienna, you have Gustav Klimt, you have Egon Scheller, you have Freud himself, you've got Wittgenstein. These are all amazing philosophers, thinkers, and they're all hanging out in the same place.

29:49David McWilliams: and they're all cross-pollinating and cross-fertilizing each other. Do they know each other? Lots of them know each other. I'll give you a great example. Wittgenstein, the great Austrian philosopher, is a great mate of who? John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist. Okay. So much so, right? So much so that Wittgenstein in the First World War gets captured. He's a soldier, right? They all conscript, they all go to the front. Well, Keynes didn't. Keynes was very tricky. He said, well, I'll just talk about it. I won't go there. It heals birds. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But Wittgenstein ends up writing letters to Keynes.

30:29David McWilliams: Keynes and Bertrand Russell, the great British philosopher, are all mates. So there's this cross-fertilization of ideas from London to Vienna, so much so that Wittgenstein ends up getting captured by Allied forces. And even though he is an enemy combatant, Keynes ensures that Wittgenstein can still write letters to Keynes about philosophy and art and culture and all this sort of stuff. So there's this phenomenal sort of melting pot of ideas of intellectual, kind of aggressive intellectual modernism. And modernism is all about what Joyce was doing too, which was dispensing with the old and creating something new and looking forward.

31:18So in the same way as Joyce was absorbing the ideas of Freud, he was absorbing the ideas of Picasso, So they were all infected by each other at this stage, right? And so too Keynes, because Keynes was the one who was the great modernist in economics. Keynes said, dispense all that classical stuff, all that supply and demand stuff, all that the price will clear everything, that Adam Smith stuff.

31:44David McWilliams: Let's create a new way of looking at the world, which is Keynesianism, which is essentially modernism in economics. So this is all going on in thought, but also what's going on, John, and this is what people forget is that there was an amazing modernism in economic development, in the amount of products, in the amount of innovations, in the amount of inventions. I'll give you an example, right? You're talking about technologies like electricity, all kinds of products. These were all invented in the four years before the First World War. Tanks, transistors, tea bags, instant coffee, air conditioning, cornflakes, the bra is invented, John, vacuum cleaners, colour photography, all invented and commercialised in the five years before the first world.

32:30Cornflakes.

32:31David McWilliams: This is the gales of creative destruction. This is some term in economics, right? Cornflakes, yes, this is very important. Very, very important. And think about it, right? Okay, one innovation was triggering an offer. So the electromagnetic waves discovered by Heinrich Hertz in Germany, right, would set the stage for radars, radio broadcasts, television, farming, the first tractors, tractors and synthetic fertilizers, pushing up yields, combustion engines, electrical motors, escalators. These are all invented. And without a blink of an eye, the Wright brothers are actually up in their flying machine.

33:07David McWilliams: The age of aviation begins. So what I'm saying is intellectual, artistic, commercial innovation all move together. And then the best way to look at all this is the number of patents. So patents are basically the direct protection of innovation. Yes, yeah, yeah. The number of patents in Germany increased from 8 ,000 in 1900 to 13 ,000 in 1913. The total number of annual patents in Germany, France, and Britain increased from 14 ,000 in 1905 to 46 ,000 in 1913. So that's 46 ,000 specific new inventions. Wow, that's amazing. So it was one of them huidabigs. One of them, huidabigs, crunchy nut cornflakes, the whole thing, John, right?

33:57David McWilliams: And think about it, right? The number of patents in the United States alone soared from 19 ,000 in 1900 to 68 ,000 in 1913. Wow. So what you are seeing is this extraordinary combustion of commercial energy, artistic energy, etc. All comes to a crashing halt in 1914 and the First World War. Yeah, yeah. So 1913 is the peak of this. I'll give you another creepy, creepy, creepy fact before we talk about the city of the future. Go on. 1913. 1913 in Vienna. So Vienna is the home of all great intellectual activity, right? But also in Vienna, which is the year that the Verdi statue was unveiled in Trieste.

34:47And of course, Joyce loved opera, and he loved Verdi. And he went to see a performance of Aida in summer of 1913. And in summer of 1913, he, like everybody else, had a reasonably optimistic view of the future. But in Vienna, the home of all this amazing creativity, something else was going on. There was a 23-year-old painter who had just been turned down for the city's Academy of Fine Arts, and he found himself eking out a living selling watercolours on the street, 23 years old. There was also in Vienna, at exactly the same time,

35:28David McWilliams: four streets away, lived a Georgian revolutionary who was traveling under the false name of Stavros Papadolimus. Yeah. He was writing a paper called Marxism and the National Question. The first guy's name was Adolf Hitler. The second guy's name was Joseph Stalin. And they were both living in Vienna in summer of 1913. Wow, yeah. And both of them together destroyed the beautiful, crazy, diverse, intellectual, innovative dynamo that was the city of Trieste. And by the start or the middle of the Second World War, one of those two losers, actually, going head to head, they were destroying all the fragile beauty that you need to create the innovative society, which is tolerance, openness and acceptance.

36:27And it's amazing that those two were living in Vienna, four streets away from each other, exactly at the same time as Joyce was celebrating. And did they meet at that time? They never met.

36:39David McWilliams: They never met. And you know who was also living there? Tito. Oh, right. Was also in Vienna in 1913. And of course, it's Yugoslavia. Yeah. Tito was a Lothario. He was a great hammer man. He was a mechanic and hammer man who became a communist revolutionary. What's a hammer man? A man who rides a lot. Oh, but of course. Of course. So what I'm saying is, John, these were amazing times. Yeah. So as we said, Trieste was the buzzing, happening place to be back then. So is there an equivalent place now? Like where is the city of the future with all the art and the culture and the innovation? Yes. The irreverence.

37:21Yeah. But also the mechanical innovation, the product innovation, the cornflakes, if you will, John. Where are the new cornflakes? The Frosties. The Frosties. So do you think that, I mean, I know what, you know, the Silicon Valley, while it's not a city as such, is that where it's at? Or is it in the east, as you mentioned earlier, like in Korea or some of that? Or is it in this new city that they're trying to build in Saudi Arabia? The line, the 170 kilometer linear city.

37:58David McWilliams: Tell me more about this. I've heard about this. Where is it? Newham or something? A place called Newham or Noom or something? Yeah, Noam. It's a smart city in Noam in Saudi Arabia. But the amazing thing is that it's just 200 meters wide and it's built of glass and mirror exterior. So you don't even see it as you're coming up to it. It's like a mirage, but it's supposed to be the absolute city of the future. But apparently in 2024, there was$50 billion had already been put into it, but its interest is waning and it's turning out to be much more expensive and much more difficult to do. Like, as I said, it was supposed to be 170 kilometers long and completed by 2050.

38:48But they've only got five kilometers done. And I'm not even sure if that's complete. So it's turning into a complete disaster. That seems to be a bit more of a vanity project than a city like Trieste, where it had loads of innovation within itself and multiculturalism and all that kind of stuff. It's very, I think we can safely say that that place will be yet another oil-inspired white elephant. Yeah, a bit like the palm tree developments in Dubai. They're another white elephant. Yeah. Cities are organic ecosystems. They are bottom-up, not top-down affairs. you cannot create a live, diverse, vibrant, tolerant, questioning city without embracing dissidents.

39:40Okay, because it's dissident thinking and disruptors who create the genius of great art and great commerce, right?

39:47David McWilliams: If you think about it, your entrepreneurs, your artists, they're all kind of dissidents, right? So you need them. I would say, here's my bet that the city of the future is already present in Asia. We just haven't understood it yet. Because that's where all the innovation is. That's where a huge amount of manufacturing power is. But that's also where the people are being liberated from years and years of underperformance. My guess, right? And I want to put this out to the listeners. Maybe listeners have an idea, because we've got lots of listeners all around the world. Somebody listening might well be living the city of the future there's a place called busan in south korea i'm fascinated by south korea john right the reason i'm fascinated by south korea is south korea is now exporting its own art k-pop yeah soap operas and south korean cinema once a country and food and food of course yes you're right yeah huge yeah so once you shift from the koreans started exporting basic manufacturing then cars and higher end manufacturing goods consumer goods they are now exporting their own culture it was when america started exporting its culture that it became dominant hollywood and rock and roll in the 1950s prior to that it was just a big country yeah but after that it became the country to be in so i think there's a place called busan in south korea facing japan that could be our city of the future but i would love john maybe we leave it here for some listeners either to hit us up on twitter on my twitter account and tell us where you think that's david mcw on twitter or x whatever it's called now and give us your suggestion of what is the city of the future along with your top 10 k-pop songs oh you absolutely and top 10 k-pop haircuts john oh yes Exactly.

41:48We will talk to you the next time.

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